…the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle.

“The fallacy of the infallible collective,” as he puts it. His approach to the hive mind reminds me of E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops:

“And in time” – his voice rose – “there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generationseraphically free
From taint of personality,
which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.”